Voicemail

JFax.com Inc., an Internet messaging company based in Hollywood, said it plans to buy rival EFax.com Inc. for about $74 million in stock. The combined company will keep the JFax.com name. It will have more than 125,000 paid subscribers and about 2.8 million free users. JFax.com's services allow people to manage faxes, voicemail and e-mail through a single Internet mailbox. JFax.com shares rose 44 cents to $4.44, while Menlo Park, Calif.-based EFax.com closed up 16 cents at $4.59, both on

They all heard the booms. Simi Singer had completed 25 miles of her fifth Boston Marathon and was headed to the finish line. That's where her father, Bernie Garbose, waited. Her mother, Freda Garbose, was a mile beyond, where runners got their medals. For a time on Monday, daughter and parents would lose track of each other. For a time, no one would know what was going on. In time, the worry would abate, at least a bit, after a text sent to Singer's son at Los Alamitos High School in California.

A Superior Court judge issued an injunction Thursday against a man accused of threatening City Councilman Mike Feuer, ordering the man not to threaten the lawmaker or carry a weapon into city buildings. The six-month restraining order against Eugene Krischer was more limited than the three-year restrictions sought by Feuer and two city planning workers who said they had been threatened.

A fired newspaper reporter pleaded guilty Thursday to intercepting voice mail from the Chiquita banana company for a series of stories in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Three months ago, the newspaper fired the reporter, Michael Gallagher, renounced the series, apologized to Chiquita on the front page and paid the fruit exporter $10 million. Gallagher, 40, could get up to 2 1/2 years in prison and a $7,500 fine at sentencing March 19.

I empathize with Geoff Boucher in describing dangers of learning the virtues of his doppelganger during Google searches ("Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me -- Hey, Who's He?," Aug. 12). For years, all I had to contend with was an occasional misdirected piece of junk mail for a Sherman Oaks attorney with my name, but lately things took a fateful turn. A couple of years ago, a Jonathan Demme film, "The Truth About Charlie," co-written by Steve Schmidt, earned me a few errant voicemail accolades, until the movie tanked.

Mitt Romney, who has campaigned for president as the businessman who can turn the country around, has often been criticized for seeming insensitive, particularly to people in dire economic straits. "I am not concerned about the very poor," he said earlier this week, explaining that his focus is on helping the middle class and not those for whom a social safety net already is in place. Last fall, he told Nevadans in the grip of a foreclosure crisis that the market should be allowed to bottom out without government intervention.

LONDON - Former British tabloid editor Rebekah Brooks testified in court Tuesday that she was unaware phone hacking was illegal but was shocked to discover someone at her newspaper had tapped into the voicemails of a kidnapped teenager who was later found slain. Brooks, onetime editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World, said the first time she'd heard that the cellphone of 13-year-old Milly Dowler had been hacked was in July 2011, nearly a decade after the event. The revelation that the tabloid had accessed the missing girl's voicemail messages in search of a scoop mushroomed into a national scandal in Britain, resulting in a wave of public revulsion, the shutdown of the News of the World, the end of Brooks' journalistic career, the resignation of the head of Scotland Yard and the arrests of dozens of people in an investigation that is still underway.

The sole provider of a nationwide voice paging service called Pocketalk will abruptly cease operations Friday, leaving as many as 80,000 subscribers without service and rendering their special Motorola paging units useless. The service provider, privately owned Conxus Communications Inc., gave customers just four days' notice of the shutdown. The bad news was sent to each subscriber on Monday via voice pager messages. Conxus, based in Greenville, S.C.

Couldn't get to your voice mail at home or work Wednesday or Thursday -- or leave a message on some phones? Neither could any other California customers with voice mail on their Verizon Communications Inc. land lines. A database error in a central server in Ontario froze the software for all 740,000 land-line customers subscribing to Verizon's voice mail early Wednesday, and the state's second-largest telephone company couldn't say late Thursday when the problem would be fixed.

Hours before he was killed, Nick Markowitz thought he was finally going home. It had been a strange, often scary two-day odyssey since a group of young men had snatched him off the street in his West Hills neighborhood and carted him up the coast to Santa Barbara, according to testimony before a Santa Barbara County grand jury released last week.